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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25892908">Stories Left on Our Skin</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/klytae/pseuds/klytaemnestra'>klytaemnestra (klytae)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Midgar Blues - A Collection of Shinra Noir [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 11:20:38</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,890</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25892908</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/klytae/pseuds/klytaemnestra</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tseng finds a strange comfort in this arrangement as the months pass between them. He thinks of Rufus less. For all their similarities, the young man he pays 200,000 gil to a week is nothing like Rufus. That too has become a comfort.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rufus Shinra/Tseng, Tseng (Compilation of FFVII)/Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Midgar Blues - A Collection of Shinra Noir [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1915873</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>59</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Stories Left on Our Skin</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Tseng/OC with underlying Tseng/Rufus. Playing loosely with BC canon. Part of my ongoing arc of stories, set during Après Vous.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Tseng sits alone this night at some upscale bar in Sector 8. He’s never been one for public vice unlike his colleagues, but he finds he needs something to take the edge off after a long day, to numb his senses. It's been a month since Tseng left Rufus Shinra, the man who he so recently called his lover, alone in Junon. In those first days, he buried himself in his work, acclimating to role of Director of the Department of Administrative Research, a position he is unsure he ever wanted, but he has been conditioned to adapt to survive, and he must adapt to a life now without the sweet distraction of Rufus’ lips, the coy twist of his smile.</p><p> </p><p>He swallows the amber liquid in his tumbler. Bourbon, neat. Orders another. He’s close enough to home to walk even if he’ll need to wait out the rain. The bartender says nothing as if he’s seen enough in the slight slant of Tseng’s posture, the unhappy line of his mouth, that he’s a man recently jilted. He savours the way the liquor burns down his throat and thinks how no scenario the bartender might envision adequately depicts exactly what has transpired between him and the young heir to the Shinra Corporation. Most relationships end in infidelity, but Tseng knows he’d care less had he found Rufus being fucked by another, likely would have simply gotten over it, accepting it as an idle fancy. But somehow the idea of Rufus’ attention straying now, after the lies of how he’d one day share all this with Tseng, seems less likely than the betrayal. No, Rufus Shinra is not a cheat, but he is treacherous, ruthless, cunning, sometimes cruel, and so damned distrusting that he will betray anyone to get the power he so craves.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng could have forgiven infidelity.</p><p> </p><p>He’s on his third drink when he sees him there across the bar, young, blonde, beautiful, dressed in white, showing a little too much skin, but an adequate facsimile. There are many young men in Midgar who've found a niche looking like the Shinra heir, models, and escorts, a few dancers at the Honeybee. There's enough porn featuring delicately proportioned blonde men being degraded and dominated to satisfy all of those in Midgar who want to see Rufus Shinra on his knees. But few have been this intriguing.</p><p> </p><p>The young man must notice the way he's staring, offers him a cool smile, and sips his champagne.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng knows better than to make a move, quickly averting his gaze, cursing himself for his indiscretion. He’s not looked at men with intent in a long while, and as much as he hates to admit it, he’s out of practice. But he does notice when another man approaches, the exchanging looks, how the two leave together. He straightens, gloved hand suddenly gripping his glass, as they pass him in a waft of cologne.</p><p> </p><p>The blonde slows, light eyes lowered. 'Come see me.' The young man's voice is nearly a purr, the exchange discreet as he drops a card onto the lacquered bartop.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng turns the card over. <em> Jinn. </em></p><p> </p><p>The first time they meet, their transaction is unsentimental.</p><p> </p><p>It's a short elevator ride to the top floor of the Four Symbols Hotel where Tseng has reserved the Vermillion Suite under a pseudonym. Whores are uncomplicated, professional, and he cannot allow himself to become attached to another, not again, not after Rufus, not when the raw pain and anger of it all still festers like a wound.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng swipes his keycard, and finds Jinn silhouetted against the night sky, overlooking the city. In the dimness of this place, he pretends it is Rufus. Lips touch the nape of his clandestine lover's neck, brush against silk fine stands of blonde, as a gloved hand closes around his throat.</p><p> </p><p>He withdraws a condom from his pocket, and takes his cock in hand.</p><p> </p><p>'How do you want me?'</p><p> </p><p>'Bend over. Hands on the glass.'</p><p> </p><p>Tseng makes no sound as he enters him. But he does sigh when Jinn makes a soft cry. It's all for show, he knows what Tseng wants, but he’s also paid to make Tseng believe in the fantasy. And it’s all too easy to imagine he’s fucking Rufus Shinra, the familirarity of it all, even if he stands just a little taller, his hair lightened with chemicals, lips not quite as soft. Rufus is perfection in a way only luxury can afford, but as he drives into the pliant heat gripping his cock, it’s nearly enough, and when he comes he has to bite back his name. He tucks himself away, tying off the condom and discarding it, and presses a kiss to a flushed shoulder.</p><p> </p><p>'The room's yours for the night.'</p><p> </p><p>The second time they meet, Jinn is waiting for him with a bottle of champagne, clad all in white. It's not the finery Rufus wears, but he sells it convincingly enough. His lips curve into a smile when Tseng kisses him, and when he drops to his knees moments later, hands already working to free Tseng’s cock from the confines of his perfectly tailored trousers, Tseng all but forgets the lingering trepidation of having come back to this place.</p><p> </p><p>It becomes routine. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The nights when there are fewer patrons at the Symbols, when Tseng can excuse himself earlier, leaving Reno and Rude to see to any unfinished tasks. He tries to not think of how they were also the days he’d spent with Rufus, though routine and schedule are cause enough to dismiss it as being wholly intentional.</p><p> </p><p>It’s the 8th time when Jinn, fucked out and pleasantly lounging beside him with a chilled bottle of champagne and a pile of caviar--only the finest from the Northernmost waters--turns to him. ‘Let us dispense with the formality and lies, yes.’</p><p> </p><p>The look Tseng gives him is near deadly.</p><p> </p><p>‘I know you’re a Turk. Dark suits, a sense of danger, like a predator waiting to strike.’ Jinn rolls away to pour them both another glass of champagne. ‘I’ve slept with enough of your kind to know your tell.’</p><p> </p><p>‘That could get you killed.’</p><p> </p><p>‘Yes, possibly.’ He pauses as if to consider. ‘But most rarely come back for a second taste.’ A pink tongue licks a drop of bubbly from the outer rim of the coupe. ‘Do you like the taste of me?’</p><p> </p><p>And when that same tongue is inside his mouth a moment later, Tseng has to acquiesce that he does. They fuck again later that night, this time Jinn astride his cock, riding him, moaning, and gasping, and pleading for more as Tseng looks up at him beneath dark lashes, watches the way each movement drives him deeper inside, how Jinn knows just the right angles to make them come simultaneously, drawing a nearly blinding release from Tseng. Rufus for all his seduction hasn’t the same finesse, the pure knowledge of how to make another man come so very undone.</p><p> </p><p>They lay together in the aftermath, Jinn idly touching the silvery scar left from a stab wound received years prior when he was just a new recruit, his first kill. The assailant had fallen 4 stories from an abandoned warehouse before Tseng had been able to question him, and it’d earned him a 5 day leave at Veld’s behest. ‘I’m afraid those in my line of work tend to end up a little worse for wear.’ He might have smiled, just barely.</p><p> </p><p>Jinn sits up then. ‘You’ve never asked about mine.’</p><p> </p><p>Tseng lifts a dark eyebrow. He’s noticed, he simply is so accustomed to seeing them.</p><p> </p><p>‘I was a dancer. Not that Honeybee stuff, a real, classically trained dancer.’ His expression is almost dreamy then, as though imagining the full house on opening night. ‘I moved here from Kalm with dreams of the stage. Couldn’t afford a place topside even though I was a principal at the Penelo.’ A piece of falling debris down in the sums late one night after a show had put an end to that. He still has the lithe finely muscled body of a dancer, near perfect if not for the angry scar running vertical ankle to knee from the injury that prematurely ended his career. 'No one comes to Midgar to become a whore, but that's that, and I'm as good on my knees as I was my feet.' He muses with a sliver of a smile. 'And anyway, it pays well, got me out of the slums, and I get cock like yours.'</p><p> </p><p>There's a confidence about him that Tseng finds endearing, that despite losing his own dreams he's made a successful life selling his company, his charms, and his body to men such as he.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng shows up a few weeks later on a Wednesday night, not part of their routine, but he needs the release. On edge, distant, he turns away when Jinn tries to kiss him, instead presses him against the glass, and drops to his knees as Jinn fumbles to get a condom on only moments before Tseng’s mouth closes around his cock. It’s so unlike anything that has transpired between them before, Tseng nearly worshipping him with his tongue, as hands thread themselves into strands of black. When it’s over, Tseng moves toward the bed, discards his jacket, tie, shoes, and curls onto his side.</p><p> </p><p>‘You don’t only pay me for sex.’ Jinn advises a few minutes later, his weight a comfort beside him, as deft hands knead at the knotted muscles of Tseng’s shoulders. ‘I don’t expect you to be honest with me.’</p><p> </p><p>‘You’re a whore.’</p><p> </p><p>‘Yes. But I can still care.’</p><p> </p><p>Tseng says nothing, instead his thoughts turn once more to Rufus. He visited him today. The first time. Rufus now has scars of his own, thin faint marks along his wrists. What a trio they make, like some fucked up menage a trois.</p><p> </p><p>A day later Tseng is informed that Rufus Shinra has acted out once more, landing him in the Junon military infirmary, and accepts he can no longer do this. He must excise Rufus from himself.</p><p> </p><p>He doesn’t visit Jinn for 9 days, and wonders if that is time enough to properly mourn. When he meets him that night, there’s a poorly concealed bruise on his chin, some client got too rough the night before. Tseng kisses it, apologizes for leaving Jinn to seek out new clients, and checks the hotel security cameras before he leaves. The man’s bloated corpse shows up in the Sector 1 sewers 3 days later. If Jinn suspects, he says nothing. There are advantages to selling your body to deadly, dangerous men.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng finds a strange comfort in this arrangement as the months pass between them. He thinks of Rufus less. For all their similarities, the young man he pays 200,000 gil to a week is nothing like Rufus. That too has become a comfort. He’s not had contact with his former lover since that night, and while the hurt is still there, Jinn finds new ways to help him forget if only for a few fleeting hours, even if he lies there in the dark on the nights he stays, arms wound about slim hips, and wonders what might have been between them were they afforded any different life.</p><p> </p><p>In the light of day, Tseng accepts there is nothing that might have brought them together outside of Shinra, that what exists between them came from necessity. But here in the mako tinged night, he allows his mind to wander.</p><p> </p><p>Jinn stirs beside him, turning to look at Tseng with light eyes. ‘I used to think you came here because of your job. Easier this way.’ He props himself on one elbow, hand lingering against Tseng’s cheek as he levels their gaze in a manner that makes Tseng inexplicably vulnerable, and the words that come next cause his breath to catch in his throat. 'Does he know?'</p><p> </p><p>'What?'</p><p> </p><p>'How in love you are.'</p><p> </p><p>It's not love, Tseng tells himself. Who could love Rufus Shinra? He's nothing more than a spoiled, scheming, selfish--</p><p> </p><p>No, it's not love. He cannot allow it to be. </p><p> </p><p>It's not his place to love someone such as Rufus.</p><p> </p><p>Jinn sits up then, sliding from the bed, and moves to the window, his form silhouetted against the skyline, and casts a come hither glance over his shoulder.</p><p> </p><p>It is all the invitation Tseng needs. They fuck there against the glass as they have many times before and when they collapse spent onto the plush carpet, tongues intertwined in languid kisses, Tseng hears him murmur.</p><p> </p><p>'How long have you been fucking Rufus Shinra?'</p><p> </p><p>To his credit, Tseng's expression betrays nothing.</p><p> </p><p>'Your secret's safe. Wouldn't be good at my job if it wasn't.'</p><p> </p><p>Dark eyes narrow.  'How?'</p><p> </p><p>'You've become my most consistent regular. Most want to come all over his pretty face, make him choke on their cocks, but not you. I don't know if it's because I look like him or if I'm giving you something he can't.' He thinks of the way Tseng is with him, as if he's not paying for it. Almost makes him believe it's something real.</p><p> </p><p>‘We’re not--’</p><p> </p><p>‘He broke your heart.’</p><p> </p><p>‘No.’</p><p> </p><p>‘He’s his own kind of whore. Maybe he doesn’t spread his legs like I do, but he’s whoring for something. Power, greed, control. He’s doing what he knows will give him the life he wants.’</p><p> </p><p>‘Without me.’</p><p> </p><p>‘You can’t possibly believe that.’</p><p> </p><p>Tseng considers later while Jinn sleeps beside him that those promises of power, the way he refused to implicate Tseng, were Rufus’ own fucked up attempt at caring for him. And how he cannot live devoid of trust, and honesty. And when Jinn snuggles ever so closer in his sleep, the ache in his throat lessens, and Tseng dares to consider a less complicated arrangement.</p><p> </p><p>Two days later, Reno returns from Junon, hostile and pissed and looking as if for the first time ever Rufus Shinra has done something volatile enough to ruffle even his feathers, and Tseng finds himself 800 meters in the air bound for the coast. What awaits him there, alone in the shadows of a prison, unsettles him, and when he returns to Midgar he does so with a type of uncertainty, and sadness, tinged with ephemeral hope.</p><p> </p><p>That evening on the upper floor of the Four Symbols Hotel, Tseng sweeps Jinn into his arms, champagne and caviar, and all the finery of this place forgotten in his need to touch smooth flesh, to twine his gloved hands into strands of silken blonde as his mouth pulls hungrily across his lover’s. He slides inside with a groan, one hand hooked against a scarred calf, the other bracing against the bedsheets as he bears down upon the arching form beneath his own. The cries that fall from Jinn’s lips are unrestrained, his nails a pinprick of pain against muscled shoulders, their bodies moving as one.</p><p> </p><p>He angles his hips just so, eliciting a sharp cry of pleasure, and begins to fuck into him in earnest, each thrust of his cock brushing against that spot that makes even the most talented and experienced of bedmates come undone. He looks down at the man beneath him, lip bitten between teeth, hand furiously working over his own length, and no longer knows if this emotion he feels is solely for Rufus.</p><p> </p><p>He comes with a groan, hips rocking harder to eke out the last of his pleasure as Jinn arches beneath him with the force of his own release.</p><p> </p><p>The lay together smelling of the expensive bodywash exclusive to this hotel, bodies pleasantly relaxed, limbs entangled. Tseng brushes his lips against Jinn’s temple, fingertips tracing a delicate pattern along his shoulder and spine. After a while, he finally speaks. ‘Have you ever considered becoming exclusive?’</p><p> </p><p>Jinn glances up at him with a look that’s not quite a smile. ‘Are you asking?’</p><p> </p><p>Tseng shifts, propping himself up against the pillows. ‘You don’t think I’m serious?’</p><p> </p><p>Jinn is silent then, as if carefully considering his next words. Tseng can see the hesitation in his eyes, weighing his options, the consequences of being with a Turk. 'You're one the best. But you only think you care.' The words hurt in a manner Tseng is unprepared for, even as Jinn pulls himself upright, hand cradling his cheek, and gives him the softest of kisses. 'I like you. But I know what I am. What you are. What he is.’</p><p> </p><p>When Jinn kisses him again it feels so honest he aches. There is nothing unsentimental about this.</p><p> </p><p>‘You were happy to pay me. But now you want to save me. I don’t need to be saved. But you.’ Tseng looks at him with eyes full of sorrow. ‘You both need to be.’</p><p> </p><p>The arms that wrap around him are a comfort, ‘I told you I can still care.’ And tonight, that must be enough.</p><p> </p><p>Three nights later, Tseng takes the elevator to the top once more. Whores are uncomplicated, professional, and he cannot allow himself to become attached. Not when he thinks of Rufus Shinra’s voice across the phone line.</p><p> </p><p>Tseng swipes his keycard, and finds the suite empty. Nothing but the night sky, and the city below.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> fin </em>
</p><p> </p>
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